It is becoming more and more of an important issue for people to be informed of the origin and history of food products they are about to purchase, i.e. where do they come from, how—and under what circumstances were they fabricated. Methods and traditions for growing and refining crops and animals into food products are currently issues of great importance and interest for the population in many countries. An overall consciousness can be seen steadily growing globally regarding potential risks involved with what you eat, especially when regarding that meat products from certain parts of the world already has been subjected to contamination, perhaps due to dubious breeding methods and an overall ill-treatment of the livestock. Since such livestock also may be exported in a larger scale, both for the purpose of crossbreeding and for further processing into meat products, the problems thus risk spreading globally in an accelerating rate.
Trends like growing vegetarianism and peoples increasing alienation from meat products is therefore not an illogical consequence in the longer term, when current methods for controlling and ensuring the quality and certainty of origin of meat products as a fact are uncertain and widely mistrusted. Because of fears of an epidemic spread of livestock-related diseases, governments in many countries that import meat and livestock, are putting up strict regulations for such imports, where demands on untamperable and foolproof documentation of animal-life history are put forth as a requirement for allowing continuing with such activities.
Such documentation is currently not accomplished in a sufficiently accurate and secure manner and is mostly performed through manual recording of animal-history related information such as date and place of birth, sickness and medical related data and so forth either on paper or electronically. The registrations are often performed by the livestock-owners without an adequate control of authenticity of the recorded data and many times on a more local basis without connection to any internationally prevailing standards or requirements. Changes in the geographical whereabouts of a specific animal during its lifetime are for example often not recorded properly and ambiguous positions or positions with insufficient accuracy and reliability may be registered, causing problems e.g. when animals are moved to areas where there may be locally present diseases, which would have to be registered since symptoms of contamination of an animal could be revealed at a much later date e.g. when the animal already has been exported or slaughtered for meat. The absence of regular, complete and unambiguous location history records disables the possibilities to reliably and efficiently identify animals which has been in contact with any problem areas related to diseases, etc.
The animals are sometimes marked for identification purposes by providing a chip or strip of barcode in the ear containing a registration number. Such markings are, if not at least complemented with more permanently attached identification means, easily manipulated, e.g. by just cutting off the ear with the chip from an animal, there are suddenly no means for identification and therefore no reference to the animal-history of that particular animal. Such strips of barcode can also easily fall off leaving the animal unmarked and without a recorded life history.
Since the state of origin declared on meat products for sale also has been proven incorrect at numerous occasions, people are thus made aware of the mentioned shortcomings of current animal registration and marking methods and tend to start avoiding certain meat products due to the risk of contamination and also for ethical reasons.
Other problems originating from current methods of recording and handling animal history-data relate to the time-consuming and extensive effort of manually comparing an identified animal with its recorded history at the time of slaughter or export and also the overall insecurity of the method i.e. that so many opportunities are given for someone wanting to manipulate either the animal history records or the animal markings for the sake of concealing animal-history data that otherwise would lead to a rejection of allowing slaughtering—or exporting actions.
The requirements of storing and analysing history-records, especially concerning location, are equally needed within production and processing of meat and meat related products where contact between any animals, any pieces of meat or any products can be efficiently monitored and where significant gains in production efficiency can be obtained.
There seems to be a need for a more standardized, secure and precise method for marking and monitoring animals and for handling registered animal data for the sake of providing accurate animal life-history data as a basis for allowing export and import of livestock and meat and fabrication of meat products according to set quality regulations.